It’s barely two months since Sanae Takaichi won a landslide election victory but Japan’s first female prime minister is already on thin ground with her party’s male-dominated old guard, according to reports.
Public opinion is still with Ms Takaichi for now, with latest polls showing support for her government at around 60 per cent.
While many world leaders would kill for such ratings, it still represents her lowest approval level since the snap election. And grumblings from inside her own party are becoming increasingly hard to ignore.
Winning the election, which she had called to deepen her party’s hold on power, was seen as a major step for the prime minister to push through her conservative agenda. That may be more challenging now as, if local media outlets are to be believed, Ms Takaichi is fast becoming isolated within the Liberal Democratic Party.
Her critics reportedly say the prime minister is behaving like a “queen” and can’t be controlled, while some also criticise her fawning attitude towards US president Donald Trump.
Takaichi insisted that she and Mr Trump were “best buddies,” hours after the president made a poor taste joke about the historic attack on Pearl Harbor.
Tensions are apparently growing over her policy proposals like suspending the 8 per cent consumption tax for two years to tackle inflation. According to NHK, a nonpartisan national council is already deliberating proposals to suspend the tax on food and to roll out a refundable tax credit system.
Ms Takaichi wants the council to produce an interim report by this summer.
“There has been a cleavage within the party based on factional lines,” Go Ito, professor of international relations at Tokyo’s Meiji University, told the South China Morning Post. “There are a lot of old-school politicians within the party who dislike her personally.”
“These are the older politicians who do not want change and did not like to see her fawning over Trump. There is also a degree of jealousy among some of them. She has risen to the highest political position in the land and they wanted that job.”
At the forefront of the campaign against Ms Takaichi is said to be Taro Aso. The former prime minister, 85, allegedly believes Ms Takaichi is sidelining him. He has privately grumbled about how he was the last to know of her decision to dissolve the parliament and call the snap election, according to reports.
According to Mainichi Shimbun, unlike previous leaders, Ms Takaichi rarely holds informal meetings over meals, preferring a “policy-first” approach focused on work rather than relationship-building. Mr Aso, on the other hand, was known to value such meetings to build trust and understand unspoken intentions.
The outlet said a recent lunch with senior party figures – Ms Takaichi’s first small-group meal with Mr Aso in six months – highlighted this gap.
Though intended to show coordination, the lunch instead irritated some allies, including Mr Aso, with one saying the setup showed no “consideration” and “spoke volumes about how lightly the prime minister’s side regards the party”.
On Monday, the news magazine Shueisha quoted party insiders as saying that Ms Takaichi was making all “important decisions without providing sufficient explanations to party executives leading to growing distrust among those close to Aso”.
Ms Takaichi and Mr Aso also don’t agree on how to handle the economy. Ms Takaichi supports tax cuts and more government action to boost growth, even if it means spending more. Mr Aso is more cautious, focusing on keeping government spending under control and protecting long-term financial stability.
In October, Takahide Kiuchi, economist at Nomura Research Institute, told Reuters that during the party leadership race, the Aso faction backed Ms Takaichi, “so her administration may remain strongly influenced by him”.
If Mr Aso is now unhappy with Ms Takaichi, the prospects don’t look good for her.
“Winning big comes with its own set of challenges, the most daunting of which will be figuring out how to manage the more than 300 politicians who are now among the party’s parliamentary ranks,” Michael MacArthur Bosack, adviser for government relations at the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies, noted in The Japan Times after Ms Takaichi’s election victory in February.
At the time, observers also noted that it was imperative for Ms Takaichi to rebuild the party structure and keep internal relationships stable.
“Her first step will be finding key allies. Shinzo Abe had Yoshihide Suga to keep the government in line and former faction heads Hiroyuki Hosoda, Taro Aso, and Toshihiro Nikai to help keep the factions in check. Ms Takaichi must now figure out who will provide similar backing for her,” Mr Bosack, who previously served in the Japanese government, wrote.
Ms Takaichi needed to work with people in her party opposed to her, like Yoshimasa Hayashi and Shigeru Ishiba, he added, and “offer concessions on issues that aren’t indispensable to her personal priorities”.
This raises a question: is the real test for Ms Takaichi only just beginning as she moves to implement her agenda?
Mainichi Shimbun noted on Tuesday that, as Ms Takaichi completed six months in office, some observers were getting uneasy about her government’s direction, citing her limited ties with senior LDP figures and officials in the prime minister’s office.
It said that there were concerns over “a sense of isolation that seems to surround her”.
“If she doesn’t build relationships where people can talk candidly while things are still relatively stable,” one unnamed party source told the outlet, “it will be too late to panic once Cabinet approval ratings fall and the administration’s footing weakens.”
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